One reason many people haven’t woken up to the climate emergency* is that it’s been hard to imagine. Hard to imagine our pretty little lives could fall apart. Miami and Venice and Houston and Charleston couldn’t really be underwater… We wouldn’t really have the entire western forests burning. SOMEBODY would figure something out if things got that bad, right? Some smart scientists or competent government officials or clever businessmen would make it all normal again, wouldn’t they?
As awful as this virus is, maybe this wakes up the imagination. Oh, so, everything can change in an instant? YES IT CAN. And you can’t ever go back to your work and workouts and bars and taking kids to practice and, well, everything. Because if the climate catastrophe isn’t averted by powerful action now, the oceans rise, a bunch of factories and nuclear reactors all over the planet which are right by the seaside flood, and what we’ll have is a cascade of disasters, some predictable and others unpredictable from which there is no recovery in the lifetime of any human being or other creature currently living.
May everyone be safe, and the sick not die. And may we allow the coronavirus catastrophe into our consciousness as a warning that the unthinkable IS possible. Everything could fall apart. And will fall apart, in a way that would make our current catastrophe seem like a pleasant little joke, if we as a civilization and species don’t take massive action to stop cooking our biosphere NOW.
*Our destabilization of earth’s biosphere was given the milquetoast name “climate change” by think tanks to frame it as a mild problem, kind of like… a seasonal cold or flu.
#climateemergency #climatechange #coronovirus #covid-19
